More than six in ten teachers think that parents are seeking special educational needs and disabilities (Send) diagnoses for their children to give them an advantage in exams, a survey has found.
Incentives matter after all.
More than six in ten teachers think that parents are seeking special educational needs and disabilities (Send) diagnoses for their children to give them an advantage in exams, a survey has found.
Incentives matter after all.
Off topic but junior Spud has penned an article. The social life of young people is dependent on alcohol and it’s all the fault of the ‘market’ and the Government should step in and do something.
Sounds like someone had a shit social life and, of course, he’s not to blame; it’s all the fault of ‘the system’.
It could be a cry for help. Junior could have written that London is #1 for people wanting to migrate but that he just didn’t fit in. At night-time there’s sports clubs, shisha bars, 24hr McDonalds even XR training sessions in Quaker meeting houses but none of that appealed and wanted to write that freeing museum cafes to be open till 10pm would be nice even long after the exhibitions have closed. That wouldn’t have gotten past his editor who insists on the system being wrong, it’s market failure, and subsidies are needed.
Got to feel for the lad.
He’s full of shit then. Young people are drinking less. Various factors. Getting healthy, needing to drive, but the big one is that you find people to bump uglies with on Tinder. No hanging around in bars chatting up girls.
The pubs around here are mostly full of sad old men. The totty is at the gym.
A mate of mine sends his son to an academically very good school in Gloucestershire.
The lad was recently identified as having some sort of special learning needs which will afford him 25% extra in his A level exams.
In fact he has no learning difficulties at all (he’s very bright, and intends to become a veterinary surgeon, which course he will certainly sail through – not least because apparently that is now being dumbed down too), and only achieved this status by deliberately answering various questions either very slowly or in a specific way intended to demonstrate stupidity of some sort.
He was crowing to his mum about it later.
He was coached in doing this by one of his mates, who has the same status – as do 75% of the boys in his fucking year.
We truly do not deserve to survive as a culture, and we will not.
I don’t see how you can knock the kid for successfully gaming the system, and if he’s bright and will work hard he can make a decent vet.
Whether that system should be there is another question.
Yep, I’m not knocking him at all, he’s a great lad (and neither am I knocking his mum or dad, both of whom think it’s fucking mad).
I’m absolutely knocking the system.
If you can’t finish your exam paper in time that is important evidence that you can’t perform a given task in a given time, not something to be obscured so all can have prizes.
I used to teach real SEND children (not the current nonsense) and getting them extra time on exams, or support, was difficult. You certainly couldn’t simply do it by impersonation, it had to be a very clear disability.
Those days are long gone it seems.
When bribes are expected, everyone bribes.
If 75% of kids have special needs, then aren’t they…. normal? With ordinary mainstream needs.
I do wonder whether this apparent expansion of the SEN requirement is simply a way of explaining away natural academic variability
The all shall have prizes movement clearly thinks medicalisation is a better way of explaining why there are thickos or badly behaved children rather than poor teaching lack of parental involvement/discipline or natural aptitude for academic aubjects
Oh, and avoiding any responsibility. Badly behaved child : ADD, ADHD, ODD. Can’t spell : Dyslexia, Likes swearing : Tourettes.
All these exist but are laughably overly diagnosed (except ODD). I never came across a genuine Tourette’s person in years ; they were all – 100% – children who swore a lot, they could control it though.
This sentence is constructed so as to give the impression that six out of ten parents want this. The most common logical fallacy (beating out even “Jobs are a cost not a benefit”) is to imply all when some is correct. Insects kill crops. Factories pollute. Guardian readers are intelligent.
But jobs are a cost, not a benefit. They’re a cost to the employer, who wants the output but to pay the minimum for it because labour costs increase his floor price to his customers and undermine his competitiveness. To the worker the income (and probably its long-term predictability and security) is the benefit, not the job. Same for the employer, of course.
Given the choice, most people would rather do something else with their time than what they’re paid for, so the job is an opportunity cost for them. That even goes for work that is allegedly fun. It all has shit bits you’d rather not do, but if you don’t do the shit bits you rarely get to do the good bits either. Opportunity cost.
Jobs are not a cost. Jobs have a cost, and they have a benefit. If the cost outweighs the benefit, the job shoud be abolished. If the benefit outweights the cost, the job is valuable. And both cost and benefit must be evaluated by everyone involved relative to themselves.
I noticed a similar effect in high school cross country running competitions. A remarkable number of participants were all using inhalers of bronchodilators to treat “asthma”. Without a diagnosis of “asthma” these would be considered Performance Enhancing Drugs. So yes, autism and asthma on the rise largely because of incentives.
Chris Froome has asthma, as do several other professional cyclists.
My GP has prescribed Beconase which I take (if I remember) twice daily and UKAthletics has approved that but not for me to take it during races (I don’t) so I have also paid attention and noticed the increase in asthma and “hay fever” *and that it correlates with the increase in growing oilseed rape*. I never had asthma or “hay fever” as a child.
When my elder son was in his teens he came to a couple of (what I thought were easy) races with me – in the first he suffered two asthma attacks, in the second three. He gave up running for the next dozen years.
There may be a few kids exploiting the situation but the increase in asthma is real.